Bray on the new CBA

As you may have heard, Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to a new five-year collective bargaining agreement that will expire after the 2016 season.

Reliever Bill Bray is the Reds players union representative. I will have a more elaborate story on Reds.com/MLB.com but here is a little of what Bray thought.

“I think it’s a good deal,” Bray said. “It’s nice to have things done at a convenient time with no deadline crisis negotiating. Both sides wanted a deal and engaged in good negotiating. It went over eight months and I learned a lot of things go into negotiating of this scale. I didn’t realize how much got re-negotiated. Everything that’s part of baseball is negotiable and anything is up for grabs.”

As the two sides neared an agreement, Bray said he was on conference calls every other day. He also attended meetings held in New York and Phoenix by new MLBPA executive director Michael Weiner shortly after the regular season ended.

By the time the deal is over after the 2016 season, MLB will have enjoyed 21 years of labor peace. In light of what happened with the NFL this past summer and the “nuclear winter” of an NBA season currently, it was very big that MLB was able to get something done without drama.

2 Comments

Who’d have bet MLB would be the proactive sport for labor peace? No salary cap, though, to promote parity. And still with the DH! Yecch! But until contraction of teams is a realistic threat, owners don’t have a big enough stick to get those conscessions from the union, assuming the owners would be united in wanting them.

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